The Progressive Populist Today Blog

Sunday, February 27, 2022

John Young: Social Justice Isn’t Microwavable

By JOHN YOUNG

When he said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” Martin Luther King Jr. was as serious about patience as he was about persistence.

Patience: a hefty ask in a tormented year like 1968. But at least the word “wait” was in our vocabulary then. We don’t do that in 2022.

Today every calculation is instant and uses zero-sum math.

By that math, the House’s advancing the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, to be stopped by a Republican filibuster, is nothing at all.

Technically this is true. Historically? No. Mark that effort. Mark it as a crucial step in the right direction – impeded by the very forces that blocked civil rights and voting rights for generations.

Expectations are a problem in 2022, though. We are used to having our popcorn in seconds, the answers to all questions in the palms of our hands.

The polls show, barely a year into his presidency, Biden’s having to contend with that. It’s “Joe vs. the Microwave” – whether on voting rights, inflation or the pandemic.

Patience be damned.

But let’s review a few things.

Quick. Without that smartphone, tell us what major civil rights Supreme Court ruling happened in 1944. That’s OK. I couldn’t answer the question either until perusing a civil rights timeline.

We aren’t talking about 1954 (Brown vs. Board of Education). We speak of Smith vs. Allwright, 10 years earlier — a death blow seemingly dealt to vote suppression: the abolition of the “white primary” in the South.

Before the ruling, primaries were entirely up to the parties, which could decide who (and what color) could vote. As pertained to the vote, so much for those “unalienable rights” of the Founders, and of the 14th Amendment (1868) and the 15th (1870).

The thing is, Smith vs. Allwright did not end discrimination at the ballot box. It simply added to the challenge of installing “legal” barriers to equal representation.

Those barriers – poll taxes, literacy tests, outright violence and intimidation – endured for a generation.

Be advised: Americans then who were hoping for an enlightened Supreme Court to ride to the rescue on voting rights were disappointed then as they are now. Even after Brown vs. Board of Education, I doubt anyone siding with King and his cause held out much hope for salvation by the highest court.

No. The hope for an end to discrimination and voter oppression rested solely with those assigned to make the nation’s laws: Congress.

This is where one of the central cudgels of systematic racial oppression came into play: the filibuster.

A rather quaint delaying tactic dating back to the mid-18th century, it has become a monster. And as Adam Jettleson writes in “Kill Switch” (from the insider term for the filibuster), at least through the ’60s “the only issue it was deployed against with any consistency was civil rights.”

With that obstacle looming at every step whenever civil rights came to the fore, Lyndon Johnson’s cajoling enough members of both parties to pass both the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act has to rank as the greatest legislative achievement since Lincoln shepherded the 13th Amendment to slavery’s end.

Let the record state that the very same arguments the losing segregationists used to oppose Johnson’s measures – you know, about federal overreach and “states’ rights” — were dusted off this time, too. Sparkling oratory, New Segregationists.

Is a Johnson- or Lincoln-style coalition-building possible in 2022? No, it is not — not when one party is the party of Trump, who owes his place in history to Jim Crow-style appeals to white grievance.

But, again, the action by this Congress – House advancement of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act – is a marker. It’s not going away. It’s a point on the nation’s timeline from which to keep advancing when conditions allow.

It’s possible that retrograde voices in the Supreme Court will deal one or more blows to voting rights this year. It’s possible that Democrats will lose one or both of their majorities these mid-terms.

That just means that a party that better reflects the nation will have to retool, regroup, win the day and move the marker another step in the right direction as it did in 2020.

Or maybe the Republicans’ odious and corrupt leader will help Democrats make a successful case to voters this time like he did when last atop the ballot.

John Young is a longtime Texas newspaperman who now lives in Fort Collins, Colo. Email jyoungcolumn@gmail.com. See johnyoungcolumn.com.

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Art Cullen: Zoom Bomb Takes Malignant Position in Our Civic Square

By ART CULLEN

The nature of our civic discourse, such as it is: I was honored recently to join Storm Lake natives Elizabeth Perrill and Ryan Hartwig in a Zoom session for the University of North Carolina-Greensboro on community engagement in The City Beautiful. At which I got bombed.

During our conversation about the documentary movie “Storm Lake” an unregistered participant interrupted twice to make the most vile false accusation against me. I had never heard of this person. At first, I was stunned. The morning after, I was angry.

Then I learned of this thing called the “Zoom Bomb.”

Unaccountable speakers invade city council meetings, school board sessions and legislative hearings to make outrageous racist remarks, to broadcast child pornography and to smear public figures like teachers and principals. And country editors.

It just happened in Des Moines at the city council meeting, in virtual small-town Iowa school board gatherings, at the legislature, in Massachusetts and New York. The Zoom bomb is dropped and the bomber vanishes. In 2020 the FBI said it was investigating 240 such incidents as the pandemic shifted our public forums to virtual.

People have made all sorts of claims about Hillary Clinton while they hide behind their computer screens. This is how this stuff gets started. Wild, absurd allegations are made and expand virally, and somehow take on a grain of truth among the unwitting.

If you cite the lunacy that passes for “debate” — like the Jan. 6 insurrection or the truckers plugging up the auto industry by blockading Ottawa and Windsor, or the banality of the Iowa Senate Republican caucus — you start rising on Q’s wacky radar. They will say anything to whittle you down to sawdust, and repeat it until they believe it.

It was Joe McCarthy’s M.O. And the John Birchers’. And Trump’s. It’s spread all over Iowa like chicken litter on a thaw.

This is how you lose a democracy. This is how you divide people through fear and rot. This is how you try to destroy people for your political ends.

I have sinned so much that I can only hope St. Peter has lost track. But the things these folks are saying are beyond the pale even in my fetid imagination, enough to make Hillary Clinton a sympathetic character to me.

The things I note are true: The Iowa Senate is a boar’s nest, and the receipt is a huge settlement paid out by the taxpayers to sexually harassed staff. It is true that Sen. Jake Chapman wants to ban books, and that Sen. Chuck Grassley is not the same conservative who ran in the mold of HR Gross way back in 1959.

What the bombers are saying in Zoom attacks is offensive and false. They get away with it, and plant seeds of confusion even among victims who know better.

It makes me want for Hillary Clinton to persist, when I used to wish she would fade from the stage. We should all persist for the facts, and what is true.

That is not the nature of our public square, which is being terrorized by people behind virtual masks who shirk accountability.

We have to reclaim that space by knocking down the lies, and by counting on institutional processes that vet fact from fiction. That is what Ryan Hartwig and I had hoped to talk about. Then I got bombed in an attempted character assassination. It messed up what otherwise could have been a moment of illumination about how Storm Lake manages to get along without operating at the lowest common denominator.

I enjoy the give-and-take of debate — here is how a flat tax will work versus a progressive state income tax. I can handle the occasional ad hominem slam — that I am just a limp snowflake who blows it out both ears. What is going on now is different. It is malignant to our public spirit. It seeks to take speakers out of the debate when facts are not on their adversary’s side. To hell with the facts, kneecap them.

The attack on the Capitol flows directly from same mentality to undermine our free and informed democratic process. If you can’t beat Hillary Clinton with the power of your ideas, then you defame her by ascribing your own sins to her. I don’t know what motivated the bomber in my Zoom session last week, but it certainly didn’t come from the light of truth. When you give up on the truth, this Republic cannot long stand.

Art Cullen won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing as editor of The Storm Lake Times in northwest Iowa (stormlake.com). He is author of the book “Storm Lake: Change, Resilience, and Hope from America’s Heartland.” A documentary film, “Storm Lake,” on the challenges of running a rural biweekly paper during a pandemic, was broadcast in November 2021 on the Independent Lens series on PBS. Email times@stormlake.com.

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Dispatches

INFLATION AND PRICE-GOUGING: THE CASE FOR AN EXCESS PROFITS TAX.

Despite very different stimulus policies, Europe and the US are experiencing similar price pressures due to supply shocks, Robert Kuttner notes at Prospect.org (2/7). One result that adds to inflation is opportunistic price hikes and excess profits.

The big investment banks booked record profits in 2021. Likewise the platform monopolies. Amazon just reported profits of $14.3 billion on the fourth quarter alone, double its fourth-quarter profits of 2020.

On an earnings call with Wall Street analysts in February, the meat giant Tyson reported earnings per share up by 50% over last year, driven by price increases of 32% in beef, 20% in chicken, and 13% in pork. These price hikes to consumers go neither to farmers nor to supermarkets, but to giant monopoly middlemen like Tyson.

Ocean shippers have quintupled their rates, and booked astronomical returns of $150 billion in 2021, up from $25 billion in 2020. This price-gouging reflects the extreme economic concentration that has resulted from deregulation coupled with a four-decade failure to enforce antitrust laws. All of this comes at the expense of consumers and of workers whose nominal pay is up but in most cases lags behind price hikes.

“So COVID has been a grotesque bonanza for America’s most concentrated industries,” Kuttner noted. “The long-term cure for the supply crunch is drastic re-regulation of the global logistics system, as well as rebuilding domestic manufacturing and supply. The Biden administration’s antitrust crackdown will also help reduce pricing power.

“In the meantime, we need an excess profits tax, to tax away the opportunistic price hikes, just as we did in World War II. Profits that exceeded a normal rate of return, based on several pre-pandemic years, would be subject to a much higher rate of tax.

“This idea will both spotlight the real source of the inflation and help pay for the domestic industrial policy that we need to prevent future supply shocks. Even if it’s not enacted, Biden should propose it.”

NEW POLL THROWS MAJOR WRENCH INTO STORYLINE ON GLEN YOUNGKIN AND EDUCATION. Republicans hope to use a schools-focused culture war to take Democrats down in the 2022 midterms, and Democrats are predictably fumbling the response. But while some polls suggest that Republicans succeeding at dragging Democrats down on the issue, they’re also making themselves downright toxic, Laura Clawson noted at DailyKos (2/21).

Take Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R), supposedly swept into office by parents angry about mask mandates and teaching about race in schools. A new poll from Christopher Newport University finds Youngkin’s approval rating underwater, with 41% of Virginia voters approving and 43% disapproving just over a month after his inauguration. “We have some history being made today. Glenn Youngkin is the first Virginia Governor to ever poll with a majority disapproval rating anytime in his first year in office,” Democratic state Sen. Louise Lucas gleefully noted. “He did it in just over a month!”

The same poll finds that majorities of voters support teaching about how racism impacts society, oppose a ban on critical race theory, and think school mask mandates should be determined by health data and information from health experts.

That’s one poll, but the mask portion of it, at least, echoes a September 2021 poll of Virginia and other, more recent national polling on that issue. Similarly, multiple national polls find majority support for teaching about the history of racism in the US—though Republicans are something of an exception to that.

All that said, while Republicans are not winning majorities of voters over to their positions on the specific educational culture wars they’re waging, they are doing what Republicans do best: making the whole issue so ugly and conflictual that voters are disgusted with everyone. Sowing doubt and fear is a specialty, and a November 2021 poll found significant erosion in Democrats’ traditional advantage on education.

CALIFORNIA BILL WOULD LET CITIZENS ENFORCE ASSAULT WEAPON BAN. California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom endorsed a bill that would allow private citizens to enforce the state’s ban on assault weapons, Kenny Stancil noted at CommonDreams (2/18).

California’s new bill mimics a Texas law empowering private citizens to enforce the state’s draconian abortion ban by suing anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy.

After the right-wing dominated US. Supreme Court refused to strike down the Texas Republicans’ effort to kill Roe v. Wade, Newsom vowed to work with California lawmakers to craft similar legislation targeting gun manufacturers.

“If Texas can use a law to ban a woman’s right to chose and to put her health at risk, we will use that same law to save lives and improve the health and safety of the people in the state of California,” Newsom said at a press conference. “There is no principled way the US Supreme Court cannot uphold this California law. Full stop. It is quite literally modeled after the law they just upheld.”

While Republican-controlled states’ previous attempts to ban abortions after six weeks—before many individuals know they’re pregnant—have been blocked by courts, “Texas’ new abortion law is unique in that it bars the government from enforcing the law,” the Associated Press noted.

“The idea is if the government can’t enforce the law, it can’t be sued to block it in court,” the AP continued. “That hasn’t stopped abortion providers from trying to block the law. But so far, the US Supreme Court’s conservative majority has allowed the abortion law to stay in place pending a legal challenge.”

“Our message to the United States Supreme Court is as follows: What’s good for the goose is good for the gander,” state Sen. Bob Hertzberg (D), author of the proposal, said Feb. 18. “I look forward to rushing a new bill to the governor’s desk to take advantage of that United States Supreme Court guidance.”

Last year, a federal judge overturned California’s decades-long ban on the manufacture and sale of assault weapons, but the law remains in effect while the state appeals the decision.

The new bill would let people seek a court order to stop assault weapons, .50 BMG rifles, and ghost guns or ghost gun kits from being produced, distributed, transported, imported into, or sold in California, according to Hertzberg’s office. Plaintiffs could recover up to $10,000 in damages for each weapon, plus attorney’s fees.

The proposal fulfills fears from some gun rights groups, who have opposed the Texas abortion law because they worried liberal states like California would use the same principle on guns, AP reported.

“If Texas succeeds in its gambit here, New York, California, New Jersey, and others will not be far behind in adopting equally aggressive gambits to not merely chill but to freeze the right to keep and bear arms,” attorney Erik Jaffe wrote in a legal brief on behalf of the Firearms Policy Coalition, a nonprofit group that advocates for gun rights.

CHILD POVERTY SKYROCKETED 41% AS CHILD TAX CREDIT ENDED. Child poverty went up 41% between December and January for one very simple reason: The expanded child tax credit expired. The expanded child tax credit expired for two very simple reasons: Every single Republican opposed it, and Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin also opposed it, Laura Clawson noted at DailyKos (2/18).

That’s 3.7 million more children in poverty, with Latino and Black children hit the hardest, according to the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University. Everyone knows how to keep those kids out of poverty because the United States government did it for six months, and then, thanks to a small number of people—overwhelmingly wealthy, overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly men—3.7 million children were made poor in the space of a month.

The expanded child tax credit sent monthly checks of $250 for children ages 6 through 17 and $300 for children ages 5 and younger, to 36 million households with over 60 million children. In addition to lifting millions of children out of poverty, the money helped families stay out of poverty. It helped families that had enough to pay the basic bills but nothing more to send their kids to Girl Scouts, or get extra support for children with special needs. It helped single mothers pay for child care while they went to college.

This program cost $120 billion a year, a small fraction of the $778 billion US defense budget. It’s also money that could be viewed as a very smart investment in the future: Study after study shows that boosting income for families with children leads those children to have better educational outcomes, better work outcomes, better health outcomes.

“But Manchin—he of the Maserati and $500,000 annual coal income—thinks parents might use the money to buy drugs, despite all the studies showing they’re using it to buy food and clothes and a modicum of stability for their kids. Despite, also, the Republican drug-tests-for-welfare schemes that have lost money because the cost of the drug testing was more than the benefits rejected as a result of positive tests,” Clawson wrote.

“It’s not just Manchin. Every Republican opposes this, too. But no one expects better of Republicans. Whether we lament it or celebrate it, everyone expects cruelty from them. Today, we know that 3.7 million children are experiencing poverty—and we know how to stop it. We know who could stop it. It’s on the consciences of those senators. The ones who have consciences.”

LATEST FOX NEWS TRUMP CONSPIRACY THEORY ABOUT HILLARY CLINTON DRAWS MOCKERY — AND A WARNING. Hillary Clinton aimed directly at the Republican Party, Donald Trump and Fox News in a speech to the New York State Democratic Party convention (2/17), and as usual, post-2016 Clinton has their number. “It’s funny, the more trouble Trump gets into, the wilder the charges and conspiracy theories about me seem to get,” Clinton said.

Laura Clawson at DailyKos noted (2/18) that Republicans are squawking about a false reading of a legal filing from special counsel John Durham; Trump is calling for the death penalty for Clinton and her 2016 campaign team over the filing, which contains little new information and no substantial allegations. Fox News mentioned Clinton 200 times in one day as it works to blow Durham’s work into a full-fledged conspiracy theory (with the active help of Durham, who was appointed by Trump’s Attorney General William Barr to undermine investigations into Trump’s Russia connections).

Clinton nailed what’s going on here, including a little warning shot to Fox News.

“So now his accountants have fired [Trump] and investigations draw closer to him and right on cue, the noise machine gets turned up,” she said. “Fox leads the charge with accusations against me, counting on their audience to fall for it again. And as an aside, they’re getting awfully close to actual malice.”

”Actual malice” is a legal standard by which even public figures can get libel judgments against the media.

Fox News personality Sean Hannity responded. “Malice, really? It’s called news,” he said, stretching the bounds of the definition of “news” even by Fox standards. “Hillary, we invite you to bring it on.”

She probably won’t bother, but considering that Fox News is facing a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit from voting machine maker Dominion—a lawsuit the network lost a bid to have dismissed in December—its lawyers might want to take a look at just what its public faces are saying when they mention Clinton 200 times in a day.

Clinton also addressed the Republican Party itself, highlighting its recent resolution describing the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol as “ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”

“When the Republican Party officially embraces violent insurrection as legitimate political discourse, when storming the Capitol, assaulting police officers, trying to overturn an election, are being normalized, we are in uncharted territory. And make no mistake, our adversaries around the world are watching,” she said. “Republicans are defending coup-plotters, they’re curbing voting rights at precisely the moment when democracy needs champions, when we should be standing together against autocracies like Russia and China.”

Clinton’s specific take on Trump and her take on the Republican Party tie together: The Republican embrace of lawlessness is so broad and so deep that it needs to create people like Clinton as villains at the head of vast conspiracy theories to distract from its own sordid realities.

TEXAS NATIONAL GUARD MEMBERS STUCK ON ABBOTT’S BORDER MISSION UNIONIZE. Gov. Greg Abbott (R) has had Texas National Guard troops on the border for months, in horrible conditions, with no real purpose and no projected end date. Now some of the troops are moving to join a union after the Justice Department said National Guard troops on state active duty orders can do so, Laura Clawson noted at DailyKos(2/18).

The troops are associating with an existing public employee union, the Texas State Employees Union’s Military Caucus, Davis Winkie reports at Army Times. “They are the first-known troops to organize while in a state active duty status, though a small subset of full-time Guard troops, dual-status technicians, are already unionized in their civilian capacity as federal employees,” according to Winkie.

The path was cleared for the Texas troops to unionize by a Connecticut lawsuit in which public employee unions sued on behalf of Connecticut National Guard members who wanted some of the same protections as state employees they worked alongside in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic.

”Connecticut National Guard members on state orders have worked alongside the public service workers we represent to distribute protective equipment and assist with testing at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Jody Barr, a former Guard member and local union leader, in a November press release. “Yet Guard members were not able to bargain over COVID-19 safety precautions, even though the state employees they worked directly alongside were able to have a voice in COVID-19 testing, shift safety, and other necessary precautions.”

The Justice Department moved to have that lawsuit dismissed, not because it was without merit, but because “the Government agrees” that a federal law banning members of the military from unionizing “does not apply to Guard members on state active duty or in the Inactive National Guard.”

At the time, the Army Times’ Winkie noted that the Texas National Guard Troops on Operation Lone Star would be one of the relatively rare cases in which National Guard troops are on state active duty for long enough to organize.

Abbott’s quest to look tough on immigrants has led him to pull thousands of National Guard members away from their families, businesses, and schools to go sit in the desert doing little. In some cases their pay has been late, they are stationed at outposts with no bathrooms, and the state has slashed tuition assistance for its National Guard. Several Texas National Guard members have died by suicide believed to be related to the operation, and another has died after being accidentally shot by a fellow soldier. Increasingly, they have spoken out about the conditions they face and the futility of their photo op of a nonmission. Lawmakers have called for investigations. But Abbott is steadfast: He really, really wants this Trumpian photo op and platform for complaining about President Joe Biden at whatever cost to his state’s National Guard.

Public employee unions are not allowed to strike or engage in collective bargaining in Texas, but the troops who are unionizing hope that organizing will give them an increased voice and protections.

TRUCKERS PLAN CONVOY TO OCCUPY NATION’S CAPITAL. Trucker convoys are headed to Washington, D.C., with plans that could include a blockade intended to strangle access to the nation’s capital like a “boa constrictor,” Brandi Buchman noted at DailyKos (2/21)

Bob Bolus, a Pennsylvania-based organizer for Truckers for Freedom, said demonstrators would blockade the Beltway around the nation’s capital, a circumferential 64 miles of road touching the District of Columbia and surrounding states like Maryland and Virginia.

The Washington metropolitan area alone—which encompasses D.C., central Maryland, and northern Virginia—is home to over 3 million people. Given the area’s history of notoriously heavy congestion, demonstrations of any considerable size are likely to cause lengthy disruptions.

“We intend to circle Washington, D.C and basically I’ll give you an analogy of that of a giant boa constrictor that basically squeezes you, chokes you, and then swallows you,” Bolus told a Fox News affiliate in Washington (2/20).

He said the convoys would control the flow of traffic as well.

“They’ll be a lane open for emergency vehicles to get in and get out. We will not compromise anybody’s safety or health one way or the other,” he said Sunday.

Bolus was unmoved when asked how he thought the blockade might impact ordinary people trying to work or go about their business. “If they can’t get to work, jeez that’s too bad,” Bolus said.

The groups sprang up in the wake of trucker protests in Canada which, were laden with conspiracy theories, xenophobia and anti-vaccine rhetoric.

Demonstrators making up the “Freedom Convoy” in Canada were in place for weeks and caused major disruptions when blocking bridges and border crossings. Police finally cleared the high-traffic Ambassador Bridge linking Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario, but not without clashes beforehand and significant trade disruptions.

How long the trucker convoys plan to be in place in D.C. is unclear.

The American convoys are a mashup of different groups with common goals and common beliefs, with most of them leaning ultra-conservative. The Great American Patriot Project, for instance, is just one of the US groups participating in the looming convoy.

All of the groups sprang up and linked up quickly in the wake of trucker protests in Canada which, were laden with conspiracy theories, xenophobia, and anti-vaccine rhetoric.

The Great American Patriot Project specifically wants to launch convoys from March 1 to March 6. National organizers from another group known as the “People’s Convoy” said (2/20) that their “unified transcontinental movement” will kick off in Southern California Feb. 23.

American truck drivers are not obligated to be vaccinated against COVID-19 if they do not cross international borders. Nor are they obligated to wear masks if they are driving a vehicle alone. Many of their grievances would also be subject to state laws, not federal ones.

Appearing at the center of both the Canadian and American trucker convoy movements is anti-vaccine lawyer, Q-Anon enthusiast, and avowed Scientologist Leigh Dundas.

Dundas founded the Freedom Fighter Nation, a far right-wing conspiracy theory group, and has pushed Trump’s lies about election fraud routinely since 2020.

She spoke at a “Stop the Steal” rally in California in November 2020 and on Jan. 6, she was at the Capitol during the insurrection. She can even be seen in one video standing at a Capitol entrance near Jacob Chansely, the so-called “Q-Anon Shaman.”

Chansley is now serving a 41-month sentence.

Dundas told protesters on Jan. 6 they should “stand the hell up” because they were “better off fighting on your feet and being prepared to die on your feet than living a life on your damned knees.”

To huge applause on Jan. 6, 2021, Dundas told the crowd that protesters would be “well within our rights” to take “turncoats” who didn’t support Trump’s claim to victory in the 2020 election “out back to shoot ‘em or hang ‘em.”

From The Progressive Populist, March 15, 2022

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Why Road Trips Aren't Fun Anymore

By DON ROLLINS

The stately lawn on the edge of town has sprouted a giant cross draped in a to-scale American flag.

The rusted pickup at the rest stop sports a pristine bumper sticker: “Real Christians Don’t Vote Democrat.”

The billboard towering above the interstate features an airbrushed Trump, overlaid with a tortured version of a biblical passage: “Unto us a son is given, and the government shall be upon his shoulders.”

Assuming you have enough scratch for overpriced gas and over-brewed convenience store coffee, today’s Great American Road Trip is an eye opener for anyone still in denial about the reality and reach of 21st century Christian nationalism. Indeed, so vast is Trump’s cultish influence, even highways within traditional bastions of liberalism are subject to signs and symbols depicting him as God’s chosen ruler in exile.

Worse yet, if the many lawns, bumper stickers and billboards dotting today’s roadscapes are any indication, Christian nationalism — the toxic meld of hard-right politics and perverted Christianity sprawled our roadways — is here to stay.

There are at least three reasons this “alt-right Christian nationalist” phenomenon has such stamina. First, because it serves the Republican meta-narrative of religious persecution. The unholy alliance of the GOP with Christian fundamentalists begun under Reagan was grounded in religious and political victimhood — a durable, self-reinforcing worldview for present and future Christian nationalists.

Second, because Christian nationalism is a populist movement within a populist moment. What Christ-and-country theology dismisses by way of critical thought or multiple answers to the same question, it more than makes up with tribalism and singleness of purpose.

Third, because Christian nationalism is flatout working. The Proud Boys, QAnon, the Oath Keepers — ambassadors all for once fringe groups that have now found their way into national conversations about things like COVID restrictions, voting laws, school curricula and guns. Truly no serious Republicans can discount the Christian nationalist vote, no GOP-driven legislation is beyond Christian nationalists’ “input.”

Clearly Christian nationalism is neither. The lawn signs, stickers and roadside advertisements supporting that empty gospel represent a vapid, harsh belief system unworthy of faith or country. Those clear, public messages are reminders just how much power Christian nationalists wield.

And that’s why road trips aren’t nearly as fun anymore.

Don Rollins is a Unitarian Universalist minister living in Hendersonville, N.C. Email donaldlrollins@gmail.com.

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Letters to the Editor

Jail Insurrection Leaders

Re: “Coming to grips with the Insurrection” by Bob Burnett (2/15/22 TPP). Many of the big Rambos and little Rambos, all with big egos and little brains, who believed their “heroic” actions of Jan. 6, 2021 secured them an elevated place in history, have instead secured sentences commensurate with their crimes against the Capitol.

However, that doesn’t console me — nor does it console millions of other Americans, I’m sure. Only when the biggest Rambo of them all, the overweight orange Rambo (who led his followers from the rear) is punished for his disgraceful crime, will our country bring closure to that shameful episode in our history.

If Donald Trump is not punished for treason against the USA, which he perpetrated on Jan. 6, 2021, then all Americans (as well as all the world) will have ample proof that it’s only a myth that no one in this country is above the law, and that our system of justice is nothing but a lackey of the rich and powerful.

DAVID QUINTERO, Monrovia, Calif.

Senate Needs More Deliberation, Less Filibustration

We have heard that our US Senate is the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body. But we need to deliberate that idea.

The filibuster used to be part of that, as it required a senator to actually stand and say words to debate and go on and on until he collapsed — or something to that idea. Now, all a senator has to do is to say he filibusters something and all discussion the body stops debating and the issue dies.

How is that making the Senate this great deliberating forum? And why can’t that just end? Who made this the “go to” solution for any senator who wants his way on anything that comes before the Senate?

There are things one person can decide that won’t even be discussed!? A “minority” of one controls the whole Senate. If the Senate can’t even vote to change that, why don’t they all just quit? Let the real Deliberative Body — the House — legislate. It’ll save us a lot of time and money. The President can still be heard from — but even he is not a majority — and can get in on the “debate.”

Proverbs 14-16 has a lot to offer these days. It wouldn’t hurt anyone to read it right now. All citizens. See if you don’t agree.

CHERYL LOVELY, Presque Isle, Maine

Masked Singer Jumped the Shark

After six successful seasons of television entertainment on the Fox Network, the producers of the hit show “The Masked Singer” have taken the concept of “jumping the shark” to a whole ’nother level by including (of all people) the soon-to-be indicted enemy of the people and star of the movie “Borat 2,” Rudy Giuliani, in the show’s season seven cast.

“The Masked Singer” season seven premiere episode will not air until March 9, in which [spoiler alert!] right-wing Republican reprobate Rudy Giuliani is the first costumed singing contestant voted off the show by the studio audience and the panelists, including Ken Jeong, Jenny McCarthy, Nicole Scherzinger and Robin Thicke. Two of the panelists — Jeong and Thicke — reportedly walked off the set in protest of Giuliani’s performance.

The only TV show characters that should be unmasking an old, greedy, dishonest, crazy crook like Rudy Giuliani are Fred, Velma, Daphne, Shaggy and Scooby-Doo! (Rudy Giuliani is every bit as ridiculous and transparently guilty as your classic Scooby-Doo cartoon criminal, after all.)

And I thought half-term Alaska Governor and failed Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s previous appearance in a pink and blue bear suit in season three singing Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Baby Got Back,” accompanied by the show’s host Nick Cannon as her hype man, was awful enough already, but “The Masked Singer” truly has “jumped the shark” with janky Giuliani’s inexplicable inclusion on the show. Perhaps Henry Winkler as Fonzie from “Happy Days” would be proud? Probably not. Just saying.

JAKE PICKERING, Arcata, Calif.

Change the Structure to Obtain Egalitarian Society

The very foundation and formalization of our secular democratic republic had the elements of male/man “power and control” that preceded that mindset for centuries prior our inception as a nation.

We’ve witnessed this power of the few over “the will of the many” (entire citizenry) from the imputed influences of the Puritans, Federalists, DAR, Gilded Era Capitalists, Lobbyists, to Alt-Right Birchers and Birthers via the poisoning of our fragile democracy continue after the seditious insurrection of the aligned monied autocrats, religious zealots and corrupted reprobates among us.

While there are a multitude of ways our democracy has been corrupted within every realm of our governance, the most recent and outrageous example in my mind was “Moscow Mitch’s” denial of former President Obama’s appointment to the Supreme Court, when he had the authority to declare war up to his last day in office. That illustrated injustice has possibly allowed our new Supreme Court, with three Trump-appointed shills, to overturn the rights of women to obtain an abortion in Roe vs. Wade that has been in existence for almost half a century to satisfy the bogus interests of the “poisoners of our Democratic freedoms.”

The state of our union for our very salvation requires that “we the people” unify, organize and fulfill Alexander Hamilton’s and Frederick Douglass’s fears regarding the undermining of our democracy, which we are assuredly at today (2022) after our 1/6/21 physical attack on our Capitol and democracy. Gender parity shall be our nation’s first step toward providence and that egalitarian society.

FRANK C. ROHRIG, Milford, Conn.

Parents Can Control Learning

You know if all of these concerned parents don’t want their kids educated at home via virtual learning and also don’t want them to learn the “wrong things” at public school, such as actual American history, and also want to determine what curriculum won’t harm their kids’ intellectual growth, why don’t they just home-school their kids and indoctrinate them the way they want? That will surely “Make America Great Again” for their kids, until they have to face the reality and truth of actual life.

MIKE EKLUND, Mercer, Wis.

Men Unsympathetic?

Andrew Yang has started a new political party called “The Forward Party.” He sent me an email titled “American Men,” in which he cites many statistics and studies which convince me that boys and men have indeed fallen behind girls and women in many ways. He wrote, “I’ve long felt that these struggles are being overlooked and underreported in America today, partly because men and boys are not generally framed as sympathetic figures.” But he does not take the next logical step and tell us WHY they are not seen as “sympathetic figures.”

Let me take a shot at it.

Andrew, could this have something to do with the fact that men commit about 90% of all Sexual Harassment?

Could it have something to do with the fact that men commit about 90% of sexual assaults, including rape?

Could it be because men commit well over 50% of all domestic violence and abuse?

And, could it be because men commit well over 50% of incest?

Yes, I agree that the overall relationship between women and men is far from being good.

Yes, I do not enjoy listening to man-hating talk and male-bashing talk.

But, too many of us men “don’t get it.”

Women are sick and tired of this evil behavior, and they won’t take it anymore.

Women were not put on this Earth to be abused and traumatized.

STEWART B. EPSTEIN, Rochester, N.Y.

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Judge Restores Wolf Protections

By FRANK LINGO

A federal judge has reversed a Trump administration de-listing of gray wolves and restored endangered species protections.

The New York Times reported Feb. 11 that Judge Jeffrey White of the Northern District of California found that the US Fish and Wildlife Service did not adequately consider threats to wolves outside the Great lakes region and Northern Rocky Mountains. Judge White ruled that the wolves should be protected in 44 of the lower 48 states.

Appallingly, the Biden Administration defended the Trump de-listing in court. The Washington Post also covered the ruling but omitted the pertinent point of Biden’s people supporting Trump’s policy.

Good rule of thumb: Individuals or agencies considering if their policy is decent and proper would do well to oppose any Trump rule.

Here’s how extreme the hunters and ranchers can be. In Wisconsin, after a court order had allowed hunting, 218 wolves were killed in four days last year.

Wolf advocacy groups have tried in the past to mollify the ranchers by offering compensation for livestock killed by the canines. But hatred of wolves runs deep in these people and they’re determined to wipe wolves out.

Wolves were once plentiful across the continent, but relentless hunting nearly made them extinct. They are an essential element of the ecosystem, keeping populations of deer, elk and rabbits in check. When wolves are present, deer and elk don’t chew up too much of the vegetation that holds the soil in place and allows many other flora and fauna to flourish. The red wolf is also an endangered species and needs continued protection to restore its role in nature.

“Today’s ruling is a significant victory for gray wolves and for all those who value nature and the public’s role in protecting these amazing creatures,” said Jamie Rappaport Clark, president of the Defenders of Wildlife non-profit conservation group, in a Yahoo article. Clark also called for emergency listing of wolves as endangered in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho where state laws allow hunters to kill wolves.

Judge White, appointed by President George W. Bush, bucks the trend of appointees by conservatives who usually side with business and hunting groups, rather than nature groups. Let’s remember that conservation logically means preserving nature, while conservative ironically means preserving power of the status quo.

Thank goodness, there are advocacy groups to bring these lawsuits. A leader of the action was Earthjustice, whose attorney Kristen Boyles said, “The Fish and Wildlife Service should be ashamed of defending the gray wolf de-listing.”

An NPR piece from last April noted that hundreds of wolves are killed annually by hunters and trappers in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. Those states are not affected by Judge White’s ruling. The Northern Rockies’ wolf population has remained strong — more than 3,000 animals, according to wildlife officials — because wolves breed so successfully and can roam huge areas of wild land in the sparsely populated region.

Some state officials are intent on reducing wolves’ numbers to curb livestock attacks and protect the big game herds that wolves prey upon. Supporters of restoring protections warn that will tip the scales and reduce wolf numbers to unsustainable levels, while also threatening packs in nearby states that have interconnected populations.

It’s worth noting here that many of the ranchers in those states enjoy cheap grazing for their livestock on federal lands, which belong to the American people. So the ranchers favor government protections for themselves and their livelihoods but oppose government protections for the wolves’ livelihoods.

The Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) states that ranchers use 270 million acres of Western federal land for grazing at a cost of about $1.69 per animal per month, adding that you can’t feed a house cat for that much. The CBD also says this massive grazing is harmful to the ecosystem, reducing once-rich topsoil to dust while depleting and despoiling ponds and streams in the drought-stricken West. This is all to satisfy America’s insatiable craving for meat.

When do humans as a species finally see that our way of dominating the land serves only ourselves and deprives many other species of their habitat and even their very lives? Let’s repair the web of life, not tear it any more.

Frank Lingo, based in Lawrence, Kansas, is a former columnist for the Kansas City Star and author of the novel “Earth Vote.” Email: lingofrank@gmail.com. See his website: greenbeat.world.

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Laura Pritchett: Our Border with Mexico Teems with Contradictions

The US supports refugees around the world, but on the southern border it’s illegal to give them shelter or a ride.

By LAURA PRITCHETT

This time last year, I was doing a legal “water drop” on public land close to our border with Mexico, visiting as an unofficial and self-funded reporter to learn more about this local effort.

What I found is that volunteers here are the unsung, unseen heroes doing the real work of humanitarian aid — and who, by the very nature of what they do, often prefer to remain silent.

We hiked in a remote region of southern Arizona on Bureau of Land Management land, all of us weighted down with backpacks filled with water, and equally weighted with the sorrow of the reality here. More people die in this region than in any other place along the border. The UN agency International Organization for Migration reported that 650 deaths occurred border-wide in 2021, making it the deadliest year they’ve ever recorded. Nothing indicates that 2022 is going to be any better.

We placed gallon jugs of water under a plastic tub held down with rocks, and when I stood up, feeling lighter, I still felt weighted by the contradictions of this place. Sure, I know: Living in contradiction and the ability to hold opposing thoughts and emotions simultaneously is a hallmark of maturity, but still, sometimes the contradictions are so extreme that the brain shorts out. Cases in point:

Nearby, there’s the hyper-ugly Barry M Goldwater Range, used for bombing practice, and the hyper-beauty of the nearby Organ Pipe National Monument. There’s the beauty and silence of the desert, despite the roar of military fighter jets above.

There’s the nearby artsy, colorful town of Ajo, flanked by an enormous open pit copper mine, tailings pile looming alongside. There are the beautiful skeletons of saguaros in the desert, and the very-not-beautiful skeletons of humans.

An area of such diverse life. An area of such death. And perhaps the most surreal contradiction of all: The assault on basic human kindness. How did we get to a place where offering shelter or a ride is a crime? A federal crime, with a prison sentence no less?

A friend told a story in which she came across a young man on foot on a borderlands back road, and could not drive him to a medical facility, despite his request for her to do so, because she knew she could be arrested for transporting an illegal immigrant. She was already on the Border Patrol’s radar. She could give him water and food and a blanket—legal—but could not give him the ride he asked for—illegal.

“You can’t imagine what that’s like,” she said. “To look into another human’s eyes and say, ‘No, I can’t help you.’”

There were tears in her eyes—she had, perhaps, left this man to die, but if she had allowed him in her car, she could have ended up in prison and jeopardized her other work helping migrants, which might result in other lost lives.

My head hurt. My heart hurt. This place felt overwhelming.

So are the related questions: Was I providing humanitarian aid? Or littering? Should I spend my time doing this small physical act? Or working to elect better politicians? Should I focus on this place so far from my home, or stay local?

Why is this crisis on the border so ignored? Why do North Americans seem willing to support refugees from other countries—which I applaud—yet seem so resistant to helping those closest to us, who are also fleeing serious violence, political persecution, drought and hurricanes?

Then there are the related issues: aquifers drained near the border wall, wildlife migrations interrupted, the Tohono O’odham peoples split apart, with relatives on the US side not easily able to visit relatives in Mexico as they have since time immemorial. Such a clearly bad situation on so many levels.

As I walked back to an old Subaru, my pack much lighter now, my shoulders still felt the weight. I wondered if anyone was watching me—waiting for me to be gone. Waiting for a simple, clear, uncomplicated moment to continue a journey.

Laura Pritchett is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, a nonprofit dedicated to airing Western issues. Her novel “Red Lightning” is based on human rights issues at the border. She directs a master’s program in nature writing at Western Colorado University. See www.laurapritchett.com

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Saturday, February 26, 2022

Editorial: Send in the Treasury

Vladimir Putin apparently fancies himself a chess master who likes to say playing chess with the United States is like playing against a pigeon: It struts around the board, knocks over the pieces. poops everywhere and then declares victory. So wrote Tom McTague at TheAtlantic.com on Jan. 27 after Putin had sent 100,000 Russian troops to the Ukrainian border in an apparent attempt to forcibly bring the prodigal nation back into the Russian sphere. But the Russian dictator may have underestimated Joe Biden.

Putin hoped to exploit divisions among NATO member nations and the United States, which Donald Trump had tried to break during his turn in the White House. Putin’s grand aspiration reportedly was to push America out of Europe and negotiate a deal that recognizes Russia’s role in the continent’s security order.

Putin thought Trump had alienated NATO allies enough to give him the opportunity to annex Ukraine. But in the past year President Biden and his team have repaired the breaches in the trans-Atlantic alliance and, as Putin continued to amass troops and weaponry on Ukraine’s border in February, Biden convinced the European Union to join the US in threatening crippling economic sanctions on Russia if it invades Ukraine.

As the number of Russian troops grew to 190,000 on three sides of Ukraine in late February, Putin insisted he had no plans to invade Ukraine but the Biden administration repeated intelligence assessments that invasion is imminent and predicted Russia would use their separatist allies in the Donbas Region of eastern Ukraine to stage “false flag” attacks on their own people to set up a pretext for a Russian “intervention” to protect the Russian nationals.

Following the script as Biden predicted, Russian officials claimed Ukraine mounted major attacks in the separatist enclaves, accusing Ukraine of genocide and shelling civilians. One of the structures hit by shells Feb. 17 in the Donbas region was a kindergarten, resulting in concussions to three adults but no injuries to children. Ukrainian officials denied reports of aggressive actions and accused Russian-backed separatists of being responsible for the shelling.

Biden has ruled out sending US troops to defend Ukraine, but he’s sent Javelin anti-tank missiles, Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and other mobile anti-armor systems, grenade launchers, large quantities of artillery, mortars and small-arms ammunition to help Ukraine forces defend themselves.

On Feb. 21, in what appeared to be a highly choreographed turn of events, The “Donetsk People’s Republic” and the “Luhansk People’s Republic” in eastern Ukraine declared their independence and formally asked Russia for assistance. Putin authorized the Russian Defense Ministry to send forces into the self-declared separatist republics for “peacekeeping” purposes and set up bases there.

If the invasion goes forward, Russia will lose access to the world’s banking system, sales of sovereign bonds, technologies for critical industries and assets of oligarchs who are close to Putin. Russian oil and gas producers likely will lose Western Europe as a major market. Over the medium and long-term, Ivo Daalder, the former US ambassador to NATO, now president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, told the Washington Post, “it reinforces a European transition to [energy] supply that doesn’t rely on Russia.”

Nord Stream 2, the recently completed Russian gas pipeline to Germany, may never come online, as the European Union might not grant the required agreement for its use, Dalder told the Post.

To help make up for lost Russian oil supplies, Biden could lift sanctions on Iran, correcting the injustice done when Trump in 2018 canceled the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action agreement, which the US, Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia reached with Iran in 2015, in which the US had agreed to lift sanctions in return for Iran halting its development of nuclear weapons. .

Meanwhile, the Ukraine military, with 260,000 active soldiers, might not be able to turn back the Russian army, but they could make the invasion bloody and Ukrainian troops who have been trained by US Army Green Berets and other NATO special forces may mount a guerrilla insurgency that could bog down the Russian military for years. If the Ukraine occupation starts to look like Afghanistan in the 1980s, the Russian populace as well as the oligarchs who support Putin might get restless with damage the international sanctions do to the Russian economy.

Republicans, searching or a way to undermine the president, complained that Biden hadn’t already imposed sanctions on Putin and Russia. However, putting severe sanctions on Russia prematurely would remove the leverage that kept Russia from moving across the border. Now that Russia has moved into the separatist regions, the western democracies might start with measured sanctions, saving the more severe measures until Russia moves further into Ukraine. Sanctions also are likely to cause Russia to retaliate by mounting cyberattacks against American and European infrastructure, as Russia already has started against Ukrainian banks.

Meanwhile, China is watching events in Russia with self interest. China’s President, Xi Jinping, wants control of Taiwan, and Russia’s attempt to annex Ukraine may provide a model for what China can get away with.

China’s foreign ministry has repeatedly blamed the United States for “spreading false information” and creating tensions, urging it to respect and address Russia’s demands for security guarantees, Yew Lun Tian of Reuters noted Feb. 19.

In a show of solidarity, Putin visited Beijing for the Feb. 4 opening ceremony of the Olympics, declaring with Xi a deepening “no limits” strategic partnership. Chinese state media said the two countries stood “shoulder to shoulder in upholding justice in the world.” And Putin held off his move on Ukraine until the Olympics concluded.

“Just as China does not expect Russia to help it militarily in the case of war over Taiwan, Russia does not expect China to help militarily over Ukraine, nor does it need such help,” Li Mingjiang, associate professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, told Reuters.

China could expand economic cooperation with Russia that would blunt the impact of sanctions promised by the West if there is an invasion, experts told Reuters.

After Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, several Chinese state banks provided loans for Russian state-owned banks that were sanctioned by the West. This time, Chinese companies would face consequences if they sought to evade any export controls imposed on Moscow in the event of a Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Some may complain sanctions are economic imperialism on the part of the US, but it’s preferable to gunboat diplomacy. Why send in the Marines if the Treasury Department can do the job enforcing sanctions? Treasury should get a chance to show what it can do.

We think Biden is right to rule out sending US military to defend Ukraine, nor should US troops defend Taiwan. But Putin and Xi should know they are making a choice with their territorial ambitions: If they want Kyiv or Taipei, it will cost them trade with the United States and most of the rest of the world. Is it worth it? — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, March 15, 2022

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Friday, February 11, 2022

Editorial: RNC Embraces Insurrection

When Donald Trump lost the election in November 2020 by more than seven million votes, the Republican Party had a choice: accept the defeat and start working to return to honest conservative values, or follow Trump’s Big Lie that Democrats had stolen the election.

Later, after 60 courts rejected Trump’s claims of voting irregularities that might overturn Biden’s victory in the Electoral College, Republicans had another choice after Jan. 6, when Trump sent a mob to the Capitol to “Stop the Steal.” The mob erected a gallows on the Capitol lawn, then stormed past police lines to enter the Capitol, threatened Vice President Pence and members of Congress and forced suspension of the electoral vote certification.

Trump reportedly enjoyed watching the riots on TV for more than three hours, as he refused pleas to call off his supporters or send the D.C. National Guard to relieve besieged Capitol and Metro police.

The rioters who were sent to the Capitol by Trump injured more than 140 police officers defending the Capitol, and led to the deaths of five people, while members of Congress, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Pence were forced to seek shelter. Rioters literally smeared feces in the halls of Congress, broke into congressional offices and vandalized the Speaker’s office.

Republican leaders, including Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, criticized Trump in the week after the Capitol riots, but they closed ranks to support Trump when the Democratic House moved to impeach the president for his role in inciting the riots. Republican leaders not only refused to support Trump’s impeachment; they also rejected attempts by Democrats to conduct a bipartisan congressional investigation of the riots. So the House in June 2021 voted to conduct its own investigation and, after McCarthy refused to cooperate, Speaker Pelosi named Republican Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois to join seven Democrats on the select committee.

Finally, the Republican National Committee on Feb. 4 embraced its role as the party that will seize power by whatever means necessary as the RNC formally endorsed the coverup of the riots.

Party leaders officially declared the events that led to the attack on the Capitol “legitimate political discourse,” and rebuked Cheney and Kinzinger for participating in “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”

The party leadership said the behavior of Cheney and Kinzinger “has been destructive to the institution of the US House of Representatives, the Republican Party and our republic.”

The censure resolution was watered down from an initial version that called directly for the House Republican Conference to “expel” Cheney and Kinzinger “without delay.” That demand was dropped, but the language condemning the attack on “legitimate political discourse” was then added.

The censure likely will increase pressure on McCarthy to kick Cheney and Kinzinger out of the House Republican Conference.

“Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger crossed a line,” Ronna McDaniel, the RNC chairwoman, said in a statement. “They chose to join Nancy Pelosi in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens who engaged in legitimate political discourse that had nothing to do with violence at the Capitol.”

But the official censure made no such distinction, nor is the House committee examining normal political debate.

The censure brought some dissent within the party. Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, tweeted, “Shame falls on a party that would censure persons of conscience, who seek truth in the face of vitriol. Honor attaches to Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for seeking truth even when doing so comes at great personal cost.”

Romney did not mention that the party chairwoman who orchestrated the censure resolution, Ms. McDaniel, is his niece.

The censure was also condemned by Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., who, like Romney, voted to remove Trump from office for inciting the insurrection, and Gov. Larry Hogan, R-Md., who called Feb. 4 “a sad day for my party — and the country.”

Only a few of 168 RNC members at the meeting opposed the resolution, which passed in a voice vote, NBC News reported.

The Jan. 6 committee has interviewed more than 475 witnesses, the vast majority of whom either volunteered to testify or agreed to without a subpoena, the Washington Post reported. It has no prosecutorial powers, and is charged with drawing up a report and producing recommendations to prevent anything similar from happening again.

It’s up to the Department of Justice to prosecute those responsible for the violent insurrection. Attorney General Merrick Garland said he will go where the evidence leads. Evidence seems to be pointing toward Trump, but as much as some would like to see his “perp walk,” we understand prosecutors are carefully building their case.

Some Republicans have expressed concern that the RNC defense of the insurrectionists will blow back on the party in the midterm elections. Rep. Mark Green, R-Tenn, lamented that the censure was a distraction from what he told the New York Times was “this abysmal administration’s record.” (That’s what Republicans call COVID vaccines for all who want them, and a booming economy.)

In addition to the formal censure at the party’s winter meeting in Salt Lake City, the RNC also made plans to fund a primary challenge against Cheney in Wyoming — after state Republican leaders passed a special rule to recognize Harriet Hageman, her challenger, as the party’s presumptive nominee. The party may help Hageman, who trails far behind Cheney in fundraising, as Cheney has raised nearly $5 million to Hageman’s $380,000.

David Bossie, a top Trump ally who led the censure effort, called the RNC move a “one-two punch” against Cheney that signaled a message from the GOP at the state and national levels.

Before the censure vote, Cheney said Republicans were “hostage” to the former president. “I’m a constitutional conservative and I do not recognize those in my party who have abandoned the Constitution to embrace Donald Trump. History will be their judge. I will never stop fighting for our constitutional republic. No matter what,” Cheney said.

Kinzinger is not seeking reelection, but he is proud of his work on the Jan. 6 committee. “This is a defining moment in American politics and the RNC’s future. Are you for authoritarianism, are you against democracy, or are you going to wake up to that slide and come back to actual democracy again?”

As evidence piles up that Trump and his allies were involved in coordinating the Capitol attack in an attempt to overturn the election, many Republicans may believe the time has come to separate the party from the disgraced former president, and that could make for a messy breakup. But Republican leaders also must separate the party from its attraction to neofascist authoritarianism. That will require reversal of state voter suppression laws and a recommitment to democracy. Republicans might not be comfortable leaving elections up to the voters anytime soon. That’s why it’s still important for Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to join fellow Democrats in setting aside the filibuster to pass national voting rights standards. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, March 1, 2022

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Selections from the March 1, 2022 issue

COVER/Roger Bybee

Fake Republican ‘populism’ delivers for plutocrats

EDITORIAL
RNC embraces insurrection

FRANK LINGO
Bunny life in the yard

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

LAURA FINLEY
The dangerous trend of the ‘parents rights’ movement

DON ROLLINS
The Ali Summit revisited

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Climate change requires adjustments

DISPATCHES
Supreme Court allows Alabama gerrymandering, further undermines Voting Rights Act.
Trumpers going after butterflies at the border.
Virginia Senate blocks Youngkin power plays.
Post-Dispatch: Sen. Hawley ‘unfit for office.’
Memphis activist gets 6 years in prison for checking voting status.
Data shows profiteering in food, energy ...

ART CULLEN
Addressing lost opportunity, frustration in forgotten America

ALAN GUEBERT
Getting MAD, mutually assured digesters, is always a bad idea

OLIVIA ALPERSTEIN
Banned books should be required reading

JOHN YOUNG
GOP’s irrevocable split with truth

STEVEN HARPER
Every day in Arizona is Jan. 6

TRACEY L. ROGERS
This Black History Month, don’t ban our history — teach it

DR. CINTLI
Maya-Nahua philosophy banned in the USA again

GENE NICHOL
What is the Republican end game?

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Rest in peace: Goat gonads, et al

SAM URETSKY
Banning books is never a good look

DICK POLMAN
‘Ratings whore’ Jeff Zucker has quit. Good riddance. Trump was his original sin.

WAYNE O’LEARY
The winding road to fascim

ERIC BOEHLERT
Biden boom hits new heights — press buries the good news

JOEL D. JOSEPH
Bury power lines

DAVID SCHMIDT
Progressives have more in common with censors of “Maus” than we think

CLARA MOORE
Why are we torching our best tool to end child poverty?

BARRY FRIEDMAN
The ghosts on the walls

JOSEPH B. ATKINS
Very hip companies face unions and don’t like it

ROB PATTERSON
Talking about Cosby

SETH SANDRONSKY
California’s single-payer health care down but not out?

ED RAMPELL
Lunana of the North Snows: Learning life’s meaning of the world’s remotest school

SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
Mmmm-mmmm good!

Saturday, January 29, 2022

Editorial: Joe Biden’s Good Start

The corporate media appears loathe to give Joe Biden credit for substantial accomplishments during his first year as president.

Working with a Senate deadlocked 50-50, and relying on Vice President Kamala Harris to break ties, Biden has managed to pass two major spending bills and came within two votes of passing a third major spending bill to provide more assistance to working families and the climate and two major voting rights bills. And Biden only has 50 senators on a good day, as long as he can keep Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona in line.

Biden got off to a quick start with the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, also known as the COVID relief plan, which passed the Senate March 6, 2021, and the House March 10, 2021 (without Republican support in either chamber). Among its features:

• A family of four with one working parent and one unemployed parent would have $12,460 more in government benefits to help them make ends meet.

• The poorest single mothers in America received $250 to $300 per child monthly in government support, along with $1,400 for themselves and additional funds for nutritional assistance and rental aid.

• The family assistance was projected to reduce child poverty in the US by half.

• More than 1 million unionized workers who were expected to lose their pensions will now receive 100% of their promised retirement benefits for at least the next 30 years.

• America’s Indigenous communities were to receive $31.2 billion in the largest investment the federal government has ever made in the country’s Native people.

• Black farmers were to receive $5 billion in recompense for a century of discrimination and dispossession, a miniature reparation that will have huge consequences for individual African-American agriculturalists, many of whom escaped from debt and retained their land as a direct result of the legislation.

• The large majority of Americans who earn less than $75,000 as individuals or less than $150,000 as couples received a $1,400 stimulus check for themselves and another for each child or adult dependent in their care.

• America’s child-care centers did not go into bankruptcy en masse, thanks to a $39 billion investment in the nation’s care infrastructure.

• Virtually all states and municipalities in America exited the pandemic in better fiscal health than pre-COVID, in an effort to avert layoffs of public employees and cutbacks in public services.

• No one in the US will have to devote more than 8.5% of their income to paying for health insurance for at least the next two years, while Affordle Care Act plans will become premium-free for a large number of low-income workers.

The American Rescue Plan helped to stimulate the economy and pulled it out of Trump's recession. Biden’s approval ratings were well above 50% in the FiveThirtyEight average of polls until early August, when corporate media became hysterical about the evacuation of US diplomats, allies and troops from Afghanistan. Trump had surrendered Afghanistan to the Taliban and left Biden with 2,500 American troops to conduct the withdrawal. When the Taliban started an offensive May 1, the Afghan national army collapsed, surprising US military and intelligence officials. Baden was blamed for the chaos that was inevitable under the terms he inherited from Trump. The Taliban surrounded the Kabul airport while ISIL-K, an enemy of the US and the Taliban, conducted attacks on the airport that included a suicide bomber who killed 170, including 13 US military who were conducting security screenings. When ISIL-K started firing missiles at the airport, US military forces concluded the evacuation a day early, on Aug. 30, but they had airlifted more than 122,000 US citizens, NATO allies and Afghan allies from Kabul, which we mark as a success, given the circumstances.

Biden’s bipartisan (but mainly Democratic) $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Law will help create safe, efficient, and climate-friendly transportation alternatives for people and freight, including the largest investment in passenger rail service since Amtrak was created. In addition to the road, bridge and transportation projects, the bill includes funding for broadband access, clean water, electric grid renewal and replacement of lead pipes on water lines. It passed the Senate 69-30 on Aug. 10 and 228-206 in the House Nov. 5. Some Republicans who voted for the bill got death threats from Republican extremists after Trump blasted the cooperation with Dems.

Under Biden’s watch, a record 6.4 million jobs were created in 2021 and the unemployment rate dropped from 6.2% to 3.9%.

Biden and the Democrats also protected Americans from foreclosure and eviction until the economy could recover, extending moratoriums on putting people out of their homes.

Biden has been blamed for inflation and supply chain problems as the nation began to emerge from the pandemic. There is little the president can do about inflation, other than directing the federal government to enforce anti-trust laws against monopoly businesses that have hiked up their prices. Biden’s Department of Agriculture is working to increase competition among meat producers and in October he got the Port of Los Angeles to begin operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to clear supply chain disruptions that threatened the holiday shopping season and economic recovery from the pandemic.

Biden has cracked down on big tech monopolies, encouraging federal agencies to crack down on major tech companies that grow through mergers and leverage consumer data, as part of a larger executive order in July 2021 aimed at dispersing corporate consolidation throughout the economy.

Biden has worked to strengthen unions, issuing an executive order to protect federal workers and contractors, in part by restoring collective bargaining power and worker protections by revoking measures that Trump had signed to strip many federal civil service employees of job protections. Biden asked agencies to bring wages of all federal employees and federal contractors to at least $15 per hour.

Biden has been frustrated in his hopes to pass the Build Back Better Bill, which he had negotiated for months with Manchin and Sinema and apparently thought he had a deal before Manchin in December abruptly said he could not support the bill. Manchin and Sinema also joined Republicans to block bills to protect voting rights in states that have adopted voter suppression bills. That prompts some Democrats to wonder what good Manchin and Sinema do.

The simple answer is Manchin and Sinema as nominal Democrats keep Mitch McConnell from setting the agenda. As of Jan. 21, the Senate has confirmed 42 federal judges, including 13 for the US courts of appeals and 29 judges for district courts. Another 36 are awaiting Senate action, including six for courts of appeals and 33 for district courts. There are 16 vacancies on courts of appeals and 18 vacancies for district courts. If for no other reason than to fill those 34 vacancies, Democrats should not give Manchin and Sinema an excuse to switch parties. If Dems pick up two or more seats in the midterm election, they can tell Manchin and Sinema to pound sand, end the filibuster and pass Senate Budget Chairman Bernie Sanders’ version of Build Back Better next year. — JMC